This part of the forum is intended to be a place to log all those interesting industries we find whilst exploring courtesy of Google and Bing.
Please keep each type of industry in its own thread so folk find them easily.
If there isn't a thread for the industry you find, please create a new thread.

Steel mills have this reputation for being unmodelleably large, and I guess for good reason, but from the 70s on new smaller Electric Arc Furnace mills which effectively use steel scrap for the basis of the process were opened up in several parts of the country, bringing the industry away from it's traditional heartlands...

Here's an example of a fairly compact EAF mill, Nucor Steel in Seattle, crammed in between residential streets and a bit of urban motorway, a surprisingly public venue for something like a steelworks! One interesting feature of this one in particular is that the lines to access the yard from it's supporting yard actually run through one of the structures, so you could present it as a standalone layout almost - and whilst it's still a large industry, it's not so large that it couldn't be modelled...

Lots of images come up if you do an google image search on 'Nucor Seattle' - and Youtube has some shots of their fleet of GE's.

These were shot in the exchange yard the other side of the motorway viaduct (parrallel to Harbor Ave SW) but give an idea of current car types - check the overhang on the flatcar on the second vid! Long cars and 'trainset' curves combined!

Thats a lot more model and module friendly then I thought it might be, being squeezed in on all sides makes for a very interesting plant. one of our members is collection steel industry related cars and has expressed an interest in a steel mill module so I'll point this thread out to him.

A more traditional steel mill, with blast furnaces, coking plant etc at Granite City, just into IL from St Louis - this isn't the largest by any means (look at Gary IN where steelmaking takes over literal miles of lakefront!) but it's still getting on for a couple of miles across...